Telefonica is moving the HQ of its Latin American operations to Brazil. In part this is preparation for the listing of 10-15% of the division on the US stock market, a move motivated by the need to pay off debts in the European (and especially, Spanish) operation. In part, it’s also a vote of confidence in their strategy of deploying technologies and organisations from Europe into Latin America and then diffusing innovations from Latin America back to the O2 Europe mother ship.

Elsewhere, Bharti is planning to spin off the company that owns Airtel’s towers, in an IPO expected to raise $830m, while Airtel keeps a large stake in the company. At the same time, they completed a major network upgrade in their African markets.

SFR rolled out France’s first LTE network this week. Actually, they deployed little more than a test network around Lyon, and even their publicity is making more noise about Dual Carrier HSPA than about LTE. But the footprint will of course grow. Details are here.

But the big LTE story this week was a scoop for the Informer: if you’re wondering why your iPhone won’t do LTE on an LTE network, the answer is “because Apple did their own radio survey and decided the network wasn’t good enough to warrant enabling the LTE radio on the iPhones”.

3UK is another operator hoping to get more capacity out of Dual Carrier HSPA before going to LTE. In fact they don’t have much choice after EE bounced the whole industry, at least until the 1800MHz block EE has to hand over to them finally arrives. The evidence from the US is that this will work for a while, as T-Mobile showed, but in the context of an LTE-enabled competitor it will only buy time.

More interestingly, 3UK is getting into M2M, having licensed Ericsson’s M2M platform. Unusually, they consider M2M a high margin sector - this is not a reflection on their retail pricing strategy, but rather a reflection on the M2M applications they are targeting. While a lot of M2M is characterised by low bandwidth, low volume SCADA, they are hoping to specialise in applications like CCTV monitoring that are heavier on the bandwidth.

Vodafone is re-organising its enterprise side, putting the current head of C&WW in charge of four lines of business for “Global Enterprise”, Carrier Services, Hosting & Cloud, and M2M.

Sprint has a history with wholesale, and here’s the latest project. Sprint Velocity is a platform for connected-car applications, including both the connectivity and a variety of APIs and service enablers.

Skype 4.2.1 for iOS dropped this week and Dan York notes that it’s all about integration with Microsoft Live Messenger, Microsoft accounts, and the like. But where is the integration with Microsoft applications?

Amazon Web Services declared the cloud price war this week, slashing its S3 storage prices by between 24 and 28%. Google was forced to follow suit. Expect more of this, which is why our Cloud 2.0 Strategy Report warns telcos to avoid challenging AWS and their rivals on generic, super-scale enterprise cloud infrastructure.

AWS has also been busy in the secret labs. CTO Werner Vogels’ blog this week announced Redshift, a massive distributed data warehousing service based on a column-store model. Column stores look likely to be the Cool New Thing in databases for the next few years - Google’s Spanner is another. We blogged the technical whitepaper a while ago, here’s the Wired mag writeup.

The US federal government has so far managed to shut down 64 data centres as it tries to move systems into its private cloud. The big problem is that only three agencies have provided a complete list of their data centres.